ADVENTURING DOWN THE WEST COAST OF MEXICO
the sands, Lower California has much to
offer. Pearls, for one thing. The hidden
port of La Paz is, perhaps, the third most
important pearling port in the world to
day; it is certainly no worse than fourth;
and vet not one man in a thousand who
knows of the pearling operations in the
South Seas and in the waters of Borneo
has ever heard the name of La Paz.
Two years ago La Paz had more dol
lars per wagon-load of population, per
haps, than any other town in the western
half of the world. The price of pearls
had been boosted sky-high by the demand
from the newly enriched of the World
War. and La Paz had pearls to sell.
It had been a pearling center for cen
turies. When the Spaniards, led by those
extraordinary noses that could smell
marketable commodities over leagues of
sand or tumbled mountains, first came to
Baja California, naked Indians were liv
ing in brush shelters on the shores of the
gulf.
They found nothing to tempt them.
They were about to sail away, according
to the legend, when they discovered that
these naked Indians-so miraculously
poor from the Spanish point of view that
even their souls seemed hardly worth
saving-were possessed of pearls worth
the ransoms of many kings.
A PRICELESS BLACK PEARL WAS INDIAN
IABY S PLAYTHING
In the crown jewels of the emperor
of the dissolved Austria-Hungary there
was-and no doubt the pearl specialists
know where it is to-day-a great black
pearl. That gem was found in the care
less hands of an Indian baby playing on
the beach at La Paz.
In time the pearl-oyster beds were
partially exhausted in the vicinity of La
I'az, for the Mlexican Government has
never compelled their proper conserva
tion. and the pearlers were forced to go
farther afield.
Nowadays the pearlers cruise, when
they cruise at all, on the Pacific coast as
far south as Alanzanillo: but La l'az re
mains the center of the industry.
The mother-ships fit out there, and it
is there that the pearls are brought to be
sold to the experts, who at the proper
season gather in the little mud-walled,
palm-shaded, dusty village. Two years
ago the tiny hotels were so jammed with
pearl-buyers from the world capitals that
some of these millioned men slept on
blankets in the dirty corridors.
Most of the jewels go to the Rue de la
Paix or to German or Dutch buyers. But
in the last season hardly a buyer was seen
at La Paz. The bottom had fallen out
of the market.
HOW THE PEARL OYSTERS ARE GATHERED
AND DIVIDED
The mother-ships are small schooners
which carry three or four canoes, each with
its crew of three or four men, who work
on shares. The canoe crew gets one-tenth
of its day's catch, paid over oyster by
oyster on the schooner's deck, and opened
as fast as counted. All expenses are paid
by the capitalist who outfits the mother
ship.
It is a prodigious gamble for all hands.
An almost naked Indian may work all
season for barely enough to pay his
frijole and tortilla overhead during the
winter. Or the first oyster he opens may
make him rich for life.
The pearls of the Orient are mostly
white and pink, which are precisely those
which can best be imitated by the wily
pearl counterfeiter.
But the waters south of La Paz pro
duce many black pearls, and brown pearls,
and golden and gray pearls, and pearls of
many another enticing tint. They do not
run as true in form as those of Borneo,
but their colors cannot be surpassed.
During the boom times La Paz's streets
ran with money. There is a story of a
black pearl for which an Indian canoe
crew-not one of whom, perhaps, had
ever possessed more than a suit of white
cotton and a wide hat-was paid $200,000.
To-day it is doubtful if pearls com
mand, at the source, one-fifth the price
they did at the height of the boom. But
one day the world trade will revive. It
always has. Then La Paz will come back
into its own, as the third-or, perhaps,
fourth-pearling port of the world.
TRAVELERS CARRY THEIR FUNDS IN GOLD
We began to be annoyed by the fiscal
system of Mexico.
It had seemed ro
mantic at Nogales-a long step back to-
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